About 700 mostly young evangelicals convened this week amid the
soaring Doric columns of the august Andrew Mellon Auditorium in the
Federal Triangle of Washington, D.C. It was the fifth convocation
of “Q,” which aims to provoke cultural and political conversation
among Christians. President Obama sent greetings by video. New
York Times columnist David Brooks discussed humility, while
his fellow Times columnist Ross Douthat talked politics.
Conservative philanthropist Roberta Ahmanson discussed art.
Southern Baptist leader Richard Land conversed with Evangelical
Left activist Jim Wallis. NPR’s Barbara Bradley Hagerty peered into
the future of religion and the media. American Enterprise Institute
President Arthur Brooks defended capitalism, almost provoking an
approving smile from the dour portrait of former Treasury Secretary
and financier Andrew Mellon that graced the auditorium’s
entrance.
Immersed in slickly produced sound and light, amid the
performance of stirring old hymns, “Q” founder and leader Gabe
Lyons presided from the stage in a fashionably tight jacket, his
bare ankles showing no socks, and a shock of blonde hair cascading
over one eye. Other speakers replicated his mode look, and hipster
Christianity was definitely de rigueur. An after party
appropriately convened in the esoteric D.C. office space of Google.
A temporary coffee house, always bustling, serviced “Q” across 3
days.
Ostensibly young evangelicals, discomfited by the culture wars
of their conservative grandparents and leaders like Pat Robertson
and Jerry Falwell, are shifting somewhat left. A poll of “Q”
participants showed not quite 60 percent opposing Obama’s
reelection, and just over 40 percent supporting. This result almost
mirrors how young evangelicals voted in 2008, even while white
evangelicals as a whole favored Republicans by over 70 percent. But
even among young conservative evangelicals, or at least the
activist elites, there is often a preference for non-controversial
humanitarian causes over hot buttons like abortion and
homosexuality. About 60 percent of “Q” reportedly professed no
allegiance to a political party.
Sojourners chief Jim Wallis tries to speak for this new
demographic, focusing on social justice, disavowing partisanship,
and mostly avoiding the hot buttons. “Christians should not worship
at the altar of politics,” he opined without irony, even though he
is of course intensely political. “We should be the ultimate
independents.” He pointed to “common ground” issues like foreign
aid, religious liberty, Comprehensive Immigration Reform, “abortion
reduction,” strengthening families, and a “foreign policy that
reduces conflicts.” By “abortion reduction,” Wallis mostly means
larger federal social welfare programs, not legal restrictions. He
is also typically reluctant to define “family” or suggest aids to
it beyond more government largesse.
Richard Land, as head of the Southern Baptist Ethics and
Religious Liberty Commission, was more direct, especially about
abortion: “Vote for unborn citizens; they can’t vote!” He warned
that spiraling federal deficits were “generational theft.” And he
retorted to Wallis’s usual claim that federal budgets are “moral
documents” that tax policy is also a “moral issue.” Wallis wants to
address deficits with more taxation, Land warns of taxation’s
impact on the economy and on families.
Ross Douthat admitted his New York Times readers are
likely more secular and liberal than America as a whole. He
suggested America has become more religious but also less
theologically orthodox, thanks to the decline of institutional
religion, especially Mainline Protestantism. Therapeutic religion,
Oprah-style spirituality, and prosperity Gospels have often filled
the vacuum. Across America, Methodists and Lutherans and
Presbyterians have been replaced by generic evangelicals,
noncommittal church hopping Christians, and persons who are
spiritual but not religious. Douthat’s new book is
Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of
Heretics. The lack of a “theological center” in
America is leading to cultural and political polarization, he
warns. He worries that that while evangelicals have become
ascendant, they likely cannot fill the breech left by imploding
Protestant churches and slowly declining Roman Catholicism. A poll
of “Q” shows participants mostly belong to nondenominational
churches.
Maybe representative of the new evangelical is Florida
megachurch pastor Joel Hunter, often cited as spiritual counselor
to President Obama, and prominent on the National Association of
Evangelicals. “Government Is Not the Enemy,” was the title of his
talk, as he bemoaned increasing hostility to “big government.”
Instead, Hunter insisted, government is an “instrument of God” with
which churches should partner. “Let’s not fool ourselves” that
churches could feed the poor if government retreated, he opined.
“Government can’t changes lives, but they have resources,” he said.
“We can change lives with those resources,” he suggested, hailing
government grants to faith-based charities. Hunter called President
Obama a “very humble man” who reads the Bible and prays every
day.
Making the “Moral Case for Capitalism,” Arthur Brooks thanked
globalization and free markets, not the United Nations, for
reducing extreme global poverty by 80 percent over several decades.
Liberal lobbyist David Beckmann of Bread for the World repeated
this good news, saying global poverty had been halved in 30 years,
while mostly crediting foreign aid. “Our loving God is bringing
hundreds of millions out of poverty,” he celebrated. “Many more
Christians are involved in advocacy with government for poor people
around the world.” But turning negative, Beckmann complained: “I
don’t think our country is serious about reducing hunger and
poverty.” Not since Lyndon Johnson have Americans been willing to
vote for someone who really pushes against poverty, he bewailed.
More optimistically, a USAID official noted that foreign aid is
“building the markets of tomorrow,” citing prosperous South Korea
as a former aid recipient.
Two evangelical environmental activists fretted over climate
change and mercury poisoning. A winsome Palestinian Christian
complained of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, implicitly
criticizing typically pro-Israel U.S. evangelicals. An Israeli
lawyer largely agreed, fingering “dispensationalist” pro-Israel
evangelicals who don’t think he’s “patriotic enough.” Conservative
thinker Jay Richards of the Discovery Institute hailed increased
cooperation between evangelicals and Catholics, whether in overseas
missions, or the “mission field outside a Planned Parenthood
clinic.”
A final sermon to “Q” seemed to warn against too much creative
hipster evangelical Christianity, emphasizing tradition, historic
Christian worship, and the ancient church creeds: “We can’t
reinvent the world if we keep reinventing the church.” Wise words,
though traditional Christians don’t typically think they can
totally reinvent the world, which is ultimately a divine
prerogative. “Q” offered an intriguing window into America’s always
vibrant religiosity, at once both troubling and
reassuring.
